


Here Today, Forgot Tomorrow

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Footage Not Found [20]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Light Angst, M/M, Missing Scene, Season/Series 05, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 22:43:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11769936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: After their Serious Spaghetti dinner, Aaron watches Daryl vanish into the shadows. He did what he could. But he can't escape what he knows, and he can't escape the certainty that he should have done more.





	Here Today, Forgot Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Originally from [this prompt.](http://dynamicsymmetry.tumblr.com/post/163929721211/anything-featuring-more-aaroneric-bonding-with) As usual, I took the idea and then went someplace a little different. But I'm really happy with this. Hope you like. ❤️

In the end, Aaron watches him go, and for a long time after he stands in the doorway and watches the place where Daryl was - the shadows, the ones he emerged from and the ones he returned to and the ones he seemed to bring into the house with him.

He’s seen enough to know that not all of Daryl Dixon’s shadows are the kind you can see.

Not even shadows so much as ghosts, flitting like dark gauze behind his eyes. It’s a look Aaron knows far better than he ever wanted to, and the intimacy of that acquaintance dates from long before the world ended. The thing people commonly call _The World,_ as he learned very quickly - and in fact grew up keenly aware of - was never evenly distributed. By the time he left D.C. for the first time, he thought he knew pain.

Not so.

Since then, the distribution has been far more even - not in the direction he would have hoped, but, as he’s thought grimly more than once, fair’s fair. All’s fair in love and this new kind of war, and love is in short supply these days.

Now there are these new people. Regardless of what anyone else’s opinion might be, he didn’t make a mistake there; he’s orders of magnitude more cautious than he was, and he watched them long enough to know. Saw enough.

Saw the deciding factor, alone and cloaked in shadow in the midst of broad daylight. Someone else might have looked at him and seen something very different from what he saw - ragged pain and more than a glimmer of madness, and in a way none of the rest of them displayed. And yes, both those things were there. Still are. But that’s not what he saw and considered worth counting.

He’s not sure what to make of this man. What he _is_ sure of is that there’s something to make.

He doesn’t give a shit about anyone else’s opinion there, either.

Except one. Slim arm around his waist and the wonderfully comforting weight of a head on his shoulder, and he leans into Eric’s warmth and sighs.

“Sneak up like that, you’re gonna give me a heart attack.”

“I’m using a crutch, sweetie.” Eric is dryly amused, and that’s good. “It’s amazing I’m walking at all. If you didn’t hear me coming, I’m not sure how to help you.”

Aaron laughs softly, doesn’t answer. He has nothing in the way of a comeback. All joking aside, Eric has a point, and in fact it’s a little unsettling that his attention was so far removed. That it could wander so far afield at all.

He can’t afford distraction. Couldn’t before, sure as shit can’t now.

It’s a cool night, and the leaves are whispering. Distant and faint, the sound of the party continues, the house a blaze of light as shapes move past the windows. They seem to dance. Maybe they are.

“You could have gone,” Eric murmurs. “I would’ve been fine.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

Slight pinch in his side, and he hisses. Playful. But when Eric speaks again, there’s an undercurrent of something serious and vaguely uncomfortable. “Don’t call me stupid. I mean it.”

Aaron shoots him a look. This is going in directions he would prefer it not go. It was a nice evening - weird, but nice. He would rather keep the rest of it out there in the shadows. “I wasn’t going to just leave you here.”

_Not again. Never again._

“I know.” Eric sighs. “It’s just… You’re always outside of everything. I don’t like seeing it.”

“I am. You are.” Eric’s temple is warm under Aaron’s lips, hair smelling pleasantly of shampoo and just a touch of sweat. “We both are, _sweetie._ Always have been.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it.” A longish pause that transcends the _ish_ and arrives well within the boundary of _long._ The music swells, falls, and with it a peal of laughter. Then: “That’s why you brought him in.”

Not a question. Eric would have recognized it immediately. He sees things. That’s why he was out there too. “That’s one reason.”

“That’s most of the reason. I know you, I know how you think.” Another pause. “You’re not wrong.”

“He was just… standing out here.” Aaron exhales, and it weighs more and goes deeper than he was expecting. It hurt, that dark picture, and so much of it was the sharp edge of familiarity. “Looking in. Not _going_ in. He wasn’t going to. He was about to leave when I caught him.”

“Makes it sound like you stopped him doing something he shouldn’t have been.”

“Yeah, well.” _Exactly._ “Maybe that’s what I did.”

Eric makes a low sound of comprehension. “Where was he going to go?”

“I have no idea. That’s part of why. I don’t know where he’s going now.” Another sigh, though not as deep. “Honest to God… I almost wanted to stop him just now. Make him stay the night or something. Wherever he’s going…” He shakes his head. He did what he could. That’s what he’ll tell himself, over and over. What he’s always told himself. He did what he could, and his conscience should be clear. He should sleep well tonight, with the man he loves and almost lost wrapped up in his arms.

He won’t. He can make a prediction now and be confident in its truth. He’ll go to bed with Eric, all right, and if things go the way he wants maybe make use of his lips and tongue as a nice little cherry on top of the painkillers Eric’s already taken, but once Eric is asleep he’ll disentangle himself and get up, roam the house, stand and sit in his own shadows and wonder.

Where Daryl is. What’s going on inside him, what his ghosts are whispering to him under the barely audible conversations of the trees.

_Wherever he’s going, I don’t think it’s anywhere good._

“He hurt himself,” he says, very soft, and he’s already continuing over Eric’s questioning _mm?_ “While I was watching him. He had a cigarette, and he-” And what he did wasn’t anywhere near the worst thing Aaron has seen, in this world or any other, and yet he had to look away. The mere fact of his presence in that moment was obscene. He couldn’t be a spectator to it, hidden or otherwise. There’s more than one kind of nakedness, and he was seeing something he had no right to see.

And then the man started weeping, and it was so unbearable that-

“I almost left then.” He clears his throat. All at once his eyes are stinging, the sting a collection of wires weaving themselves into a solid ball and sinking into his chest. “I should have.”

The longest pause yet, so long he starts to doubt that it’s a pause. It’s not exactly comfortable, but he subsides into it with an odd species of relief. It’s a cliché that the best people are the ones you can simply be with and feel no obligation to talk, but some things are clichés because they’re so universally true, and with Eric, that was part of how he began to know. That this was right. That this man was right, for him and for everything.

Sitting in silence with him by a campfire in the humid thickness of the night, in another land and another world or in this one or in any of them, any he can imagine and many he never could, he knows it would be this way.

But then: “You shouldn’t have.” Firm. Not a quaver of doubt. When Eric is certain, he’s immovable. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

Aaron huffs a dimly surprised laugh, glances at him. The way the moonlight seems to both sharpen and soften his features, the curve of his lips, the way his eyes are shining. Shining more than usual.

“Why?”

“Because he’s not afraid,” Eric says simply. “Of us.” He laughs too, and it’s not a huff. It’s a rolling chuckle, more than a touch wry. “And normally, just looking at him, I’d figure that out of any of them he would have the biggest problem with us. But he doesn’t care. He really doesn’t give a shit at all.”

He doesn’t. Wary, absolutely. Prickly. No eagerness whatsoever to get chummy. But there wasn’t much fear to begin with, and there’s even less now. Cranky Georgia redneck who looks like even at the best times he’s most comfortable in the backest of the backwoods, and yet if he thought twice about coming in and breaking bread with a couple of queers, it had nothing to do with their queerness.

It was about the bread. About the light. About leaving those shadows.

“Guess you’re right.”

“You don’t guess. You know it.” And there’s the thump of the crutch as Eric shifts and presses his lips to Aaron’s jaw, his ear, and earns himself a delightful little shiver. “Stop working now. Come to bed. I’m horribly wounded, carry me upstairs in your burly arms.”

So things do go the way he wants. They very much do, and it’s easy and slow and everything he needed, coming in a hot, groaning rush over Eric’s hands and belly, the taste of him mingling with the last traces of the wine.

But his prediction was correct, as he knew it would be. Later, he gets up. He wanders, hopelessly restless. He did what he could. That useless refrain, over and over. He did what he could. He saw something wrong and he tried to make it right, and he did everything he could do. He did.

He never does. There’s always something more he could have done.

Standing at the window and looking out at the sleeping Zone, the music fallen silent and the lights long since extinguished. Everyone gone home.

Except him. He’s out there somewhere. Aaron needs no confirmation to be completely certain: he’s sleepless and doing his own wandering. Alone.

Maybe thinking along the same lines. The broken roads that lead to whatever made him do that to himself, whatever made him so angry and so sad that he couldn’t stand to _not_ do it. Whatever shattered him and infested him with all these shadows, and won’t let him rest.

 _Come back._ He mouths it, breath fogging the windowpane and the glass unnaturally cold under his fingertips. _You don’t have to. You don’t have to do that anymore. You have a place. I made it for you. Come back and be in it._

But at least for right now, there’s nothing more he can do.

Eventually he goes back upstairs. Eventually, finally, sleep does find him.


End file.
